Mac OS X Apache and PHP Setup

To setup the Apache and PHP on OS X El Captain, thanks to this artile of Ole Michelsen

In terminal,

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httpd -v

It would display the installed version of Apache, to start Apache

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sudo apachectl start

Open http://localhost in a browser, if everything works, a webpage
with text “It works” would display.

Next, create a Sites folder under the user folder,

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mkdir ~/Sites

We need to create a new user config for Apache(The user config is actually already created when I go to the folder /etc/apache2/users/),

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sudo vim /etc/apache2/users/Watson.config

Paste the following config or modify the existed ones in the Watson.config(I didn’t dig into what these configs are used for),

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<Directory "/Users/*/Sites/">
  Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Require all granted
</Directory>

Next, to enable the Apache using our own user directory to serve files, modify the httpd.conf file.

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sudo vim /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

In vim, press / for searching and search for “userdir”, uncomment the following lines(remove the leading#),

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LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache2/mod_userdir.so
LoadModule alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_alias.so
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

And one more line to uncomment,

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Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

Note, from another post on Stackoverflow
There is one more config in httpd.conf,
Change

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User _www
Group _www

To

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User Watson
Group staff

Next, modify the httpd-userdir.conf file,

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sudo vim /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf 

Uncomment the following line, then save the file.

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Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf

Next, restart Apache,

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sudo apachectl restart

To test that PHP is working, create a PHP test file in your new user level web root (~/Sites),

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printf "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > ~/Sites/phpinfo.php

Open the http://localhost/~Watson/phpinfo.php in a browser to see if the configuration works.
If you want Apache to start up automatically after a restart, run the following command in the Terminal,

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sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist

The reason I install Apache and PHP is that I want a script to upload some images from a Java server. In the installation, the php code has some “write privileges” issue, then I found the solution from the stackoverflow.